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prek

prek

pre-commit is a framework to run hooks written in many languages, and it manages the language toolchain and dependencies for running the hooks.

prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.

Note

Although prek is pretty new, it's already powering real‑world projects like CPython, Apache Airflow, FastAPI, and more projects are picking it up—see Who is using prek?. If you're looking for an alternative to pre-commit, please give it a try—we'd love your feedback!

Please note that some languages are not yet supported for full drop‑in parity with pre-commit. See Language Support for current status.

Features

  • A single binary with no dependencies, does not require Python or any other runtime.
  • Faster than pre-commit and more efficient in disk space usage.
  • Fully compatible with the original pre-commit configurations and hooks.
  • Built-in support for monorepos (i.e. workspace mode).
  • Integration with uv for managing Python virtual environments and dependencies.
  • Improved toolchain installations for Python, Node.js, Bun, Go, Rust and Ruby, shared between hooks.
  • Built-in Rust-native implementation of some common hooks.

Why prek?

prek is faster

  • It is multiple times faster than pre-commit while also using less disk space.
  • Hook environments and toolchains are shared across hooks instead of being duplicated per repository, which reduces both install time and cache size.
  • Repositories are fetched in parallel, hook environments are prepared in parallel when their dependencies do not overlap, and hooks can run concurrently by priority.
  • It uses uv for creating Python virtualenvs and installing dependencies, which is known for its speed and efficiency.
  • It implements some common hooks in Rust as builtins, which are faster than their Python counterparts.
  • It supports repo: builtin for offline, zero-setup hooks, which is not available in pre-commit.

prek is easier to work with

  • No need to install Python or any other runtime just to use prek; it is a single binary.
  • prek automatically installs the toolchains it needs for supported languages, so you spend less time managing Python versions, Node runtimes, Ruby installs, and similar setup.
  • It supports native prek.toml in addition to pre-commit YAML, and prek util yaml-to-toml helps migrate existing configs.
  • Built-in support for workspaces means monorepos can keep separate configs per project and still run everything from one command.
  • prek install and prek uninstall honor repo-local and worktree-local core.hooksPath.
  • prek run supports selecting or skipping multiple projects or hooks in workspace mode, instead of only accepting a single optional hook id, and adds quality-of-life improvements such as --dry-run, --directory, --last-commit, and --no-fail-fast.
  • prek list, prek util identify, and prek util list-builtins make it easier to inspect configured hooks, debug file matching, and discover builtins.

prek includes security-focused safeguards

  • prek auto-update supports --cooldown-days, so you can keep newly published releases on hold for a cooling-off period before adopting them.
  • prek auto-update validates pinned SHA revisions against the fetched upstream refs, including impostor-commit detection, and keeps # frozen: comments in sync with the configured commit.
  • prek auto-update --check is useful in CI when you want updates or frozen-reference mismatches to fail the job without rewriting the config.

For more detailed improvements prek offers, take a look at Difference from pre-commit.

Who is using prek?

prek is pretty new, but it is already being used or recommend by some projects and organizations:

Badges

Show that your project uses prek with a badge in your README:

prek

[![prek](https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/j178/prek/master/docs/assets/badge-v0.json)](https://github.com/j178/prek)

<a href="https://github.com/j178/prek">
  <img src="https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/j178/prek/master/docs/assets/badge-v0.json" alt="prek">
</a>

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/j178/prek/master/docs/assets/badge-v0.json
   :target: https://github.com/j178/prek
   :alt: prek